| |
|
|
Bentley Little
Bentley Little was born in 1960, just a month after his mother attended the movie premier of Psycho. His first novel, The Revelation, was published in 1990. When he read this novel, Stephen King became an instant fan. The Revelation earned Little the Bram Stoker Award for "Best First Novel" in 1990 - a remarkable achievement for a story that was his master's thesis during his attendance at California State University at Fullerton. Little then moved from St. Martin's Press to New American Library for his next two novels, but was dropped from the company after he refused to write a police procedural as his next book. Some time later, he returned to New American Library, and he has stayed with them right to this day. Little has often said that he firmly considers himself a horror novelist, and that he prefers to write in the "horror genre," as opposed to the "suspense" or "dark fantasy" genres. He has always been ardent devotee of horror fiction, and has often been described as a "disciple" of Stephen King. The main recurring themes in Bentley Little's work include distrust of conformity (The Association, The Ignored), distaste for large corporations (The Store, The Policy), and taboo subjects such as incest. These elements, especially the latter, are very reminiscent of the work of J.G. Ballard. Little's stories tend to contain overtly supernatural forces rather than relying on pseudo-scientific explanations like many other horror stories. Nearly all of his novels have very simple titles. There is a recurring character in several of Little's novels, a horror author named Phillip Emmons, after a pseudonym Little used for an early novel. A somewhat incompetent FBI agent called Greg Rossiter also appears in supporting roles in several books, as do references to a company called Automated Interface, which is mentioned in The Ignored, The House, His Father's Son, and The Return and plays a larger role in The Ignored. In addition, one of the main characters of Dominion, Penelope Daneam, is mentioned in The Return as having been a love interest of one of that book's characters when he was in college, and the Mogollon Monster from The Return is mentioned briefly in The Summoning. The Store crops up in most of Little's novels published since 1997, though mostly only in passing as a place where characters have shopped, not as the evil entity it is depicted as in the eponymous novel. Samantha from The Store is mentioned in The Resort, an amusement park called Familyland is mentioned in several books, and the Chinese restaurant where one of the main characters works in The Summoning is mentioned in The Walking. These connections give the reader a sense of continuity between the stories, as though all or most of Little's books take place in the same fictional universe. Bentley Little's work has been translated into seven different languages. Several of his novels have been optioned for film. A true underground success story, Bentley Little has written some of the most outstanding and thought-provoking horror fiction of the 1990s, and his popularity has now grown so much that he looks set to break into mainstream fiction. Novels
Bibliography * The Revelation (1989) Collections * Murmurous Haunts (1997) Short stories * Witch Woman (1985)
Copyright © 2008 |
